Mental Models

This page will always be a work in progress. It houses all of the mental models that I am learning about and building into the bedrock of my thinking and decision making. It's the master page, summarizing each mental model that I've worked on. Each summarized model links to a page where I explore it in more depth.

The goal of this project is first to understand these models, and then to actually use them in real life, which I find to be the hardest part.

It's one thing to collect models and organize them neatly. It's an entirely different thing to actually put a model into practice so many times that it becomes part of your unconscious decision-making process.

Psychology

Tilt - ​A frustrated, confused state of mind caused by the emotional stress of losing. Happens a lot in strategic games that have an element of luck, like poker. Tilting is best thought of as a degradation of your skill level, so tilting less allows you to beat people that are actually better than you, because you're playing at your skill cap more often than they are.

Business

Investing

​Mr. Market

Circle of competence

Ecology

​Complex adaptive systems

Systems Thinking

Economics

Pareto Principle - ​Most things in life (effort, reward, output) are not distributed evenly. You take take advantage of this by isolating the inputs that lead to most of the output in any area. However, this is easy to over-apply.

Statistics

Chemistry

​Thermodynamics

Kinetics

Autocatalysis

Physics

​Newton’s Laws

Momentum

Quantum Mechanics

Critical Mass

Equilibrium

Biology​

​Natural Selection

Other Mental Models

​Information Asymmetry - A situation where one one party has more information than the other. They can also have the same amount, but higher quality. Either case gives the party with more / better information a huge advantage. Shows up a lot in investing and games like poker.